Donald Trump’s Russia connections

WASHINGTON — Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has proudly disdained the knowledge of experts, particularly within the realm of foreign policy.

“I watch the shows,” the Republican frontrunner infamously said last year on “Meet the Press” when questioned about where he had gained knowledge of military matters. Asked with whom he consults about foreign affairs on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last month, Trump bragged, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

On Wednesday, however, Trump found himself among a roomful of policy wonks when he delivered his first major foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel under the auspices of a Washington establishment think tank: the Center for the National Interest. Originally known as the Nixon Center, the former president’s once-eponymous institution is a hub of foreign policy “realism,” a doctrine of restraint and accommodation that is making a comeback in the post-George W. Bush age of American world-weariness.

As is often the case with Western PR men hired to put lipstick on a pig, the pig is still a pig.

Trump’s speech — introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq and about as establishment a figure as one finds in the Republican foreign policy firmament — represents the latest phase of a makeover strategy implemented by Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican aide whom Trump hired last month to professionalize his improvisational, unwieldy campaign. (Khalilzad was the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration, making his hosting Trump — who reiterated, albeit not explicitly, his proposal for banning Muslim entry to the US in his speech today — strange to say the least.)

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That Trump would choose the Center for the National Interest as the place to premier his new seriousness on foreign policy has Manafort’s fingerprints all over it. For Manafort and the Center have something very important in common: both have ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin, (whose ambassador to the United States sat in the front row for Trump’s address).

For years, Manafort worked as a consultant to ex-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, building what his own friends characterized as a “political love connection” with the pro-Russian leader. It was Yanukovych’s last-minute refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union in 2013 that sparked the Maidan revolution that ultimately drove him from power after his security forces murdered some 100 protestors in downtown Kiev. Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he remains.

Manafort was paid handsomely to clean up Yanukovych’s negative image, much as he is currently trying to do with Trump. But as is often the case with Western PR men hired to put lipstick on a pig, the pig is still a pig.

“Trump is a dangerous, ignorant demagogue” — Professor Eliot Cohen

As for the Center, both it and its journal, the National Interest, are two of the most Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital, even more so that the Carnegie Moscow Center, which has evolved from a hub of Russian liberalism into an accomodationist, intellectually-compromised think tank.

Center director Dmitri Simes worked as an aide to Nixon and for decades has used his connections to the Kremlin — real or perceived — to cultivate a reputation in Washington as one of the few Russia hands who intimately knows that country’s politics. For years, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Russian government-funded Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a New York-based institution whose head, Adranik Migranyan, was personally appointed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to a State Department cable released by Wikileaks. In May 2014, the two think tanks held a press conference defending Russia’s position in Ukraine.

In 2013, Simes graced the stage alongside Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club, a conference formerly attended by respected Western Russia watchers but which has, since the Crimean annexation, fallen into disrepute and is now frequented almost exclusively by Putin apologists. At Valdai, Putin referred to Simes as his “American friend and colleague” and Simes stated “I fully support President Putin’s tough stance [on Syria].”

This deference towards Russia extends to the National Interest, which for years published Migranyan’s slavish musings on Putin, (“Russia’s Reagan,” the “bold leader and visionary”) and includes on its board Alexey Pushkov, a 9/11 Truther and chairman of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee. “Although there is diversity in the dozens of articles TNI has run, its editorial staff leans heavily toward portrayal of the Kiev protests as an illegitimate coup d’état while encouraging concessions to Russia rather than a firm response to its aggression,” my colleague David Adesnik wrote in 2014.

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Another association connecting Trump to the Center is Richard Burt, chairman of the National Interest’s advisory council, and a former ambassador to Germany and State Department official during the Reagan administration. According to a knowledgeable source, Burt, who had previously worked as an unpaid advisor to former Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, has been enlisted by Manafort to join Trump’s campaign and helped draft his speech (neither Burt nor Manafort responded to inquiries). Burt sits on the senior advisory board of the Russian Alfa Bank.

In an interview with the National Interest published earlier this month, Burt offered some clues as to where his sympathies lie. Deriding Hillary Clinton for embracing the “Washington think tank consensus,” he spoke favorably of Trump’s “America First” policy (a term that Trump explicitly used in his speech Wednesday, declaring that it “will be the major and overriding theme of my administration”) and expressed agreement with the candidate’s comments on America’s allies posing a “free rider problem.” (Perhaps blowing a kiss at Trump, on April 14 the Center hosted a panel discussion with Burt and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer entitled, “Does America Need Allies?”)

Burt was also recently overheard rushing to the defense of Trump before a group of critical foreign policy experts in Washington, “very conspicuously making a comment that no matter what you think of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz is far more dangerous,” according to one person privy to the conversation. Burt also expressed skepticism about the relevance of NATO, another Trump talking point.

“He is a weather vane with a tremendous sixth sense of knowing what a lot of people want or which way the wind is blowing and he will go that way, he is not a counter-culturalist, he is not someone who will speak truth to power, he will go with it,” a former Reagan State Department official who worked alongside Burt told me. “He is enormously valuable to observe because if he thinks this, it is the way power is trending.”

Burt potentially joining the Trump campaign would be a coup for the Republican front-runner, whose publicly named list of advisors is comprised entirely of cranks, wannabes and the never-was. That so few Republican foreign policy hands have joined the Trump campaign is partly due to the dogged efforts of Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a counselor in the State Department under former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who last month organized an open letter signed by over 100 Republican national security leaders denouncing Trump.

“Well, we’re all known by the company we choose to keep, aren’t we?” Cohen said when I asked him about the Center’s hosting Trump. “Trump is a dangerous, ignorant demagogue. To give him a platform, and hence legitimacy, is to be complicit in his rise.”

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, correspondent for The Daily Beast and columnist for Tablet Magazine, is a former Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin and a frequent contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His book, “The End of Europe,” is forthcoming from Yale University Press this fall.

G.S.

Well, that’s all pretty tenuous and circumstantial…

Posted on 4/29/16 | 12:26 AM CET

Phil Paulbeck

Sad to say, Trump is the best of poor choices.

Posted on 4/30/16 | 7:22 AM CET

davrobi

Jaime Kirkpatrick, character assassin for the traitor neocons attempts another smear of a presidential candidate who campaigns as a non-interventionist. It is laughable that Jaime relies on Eliot Cohen, architect of PNAC and the disaster of Iraq, for expertise. These dual passport Israelis should have their U.S. passports pulled for Treason.

Posted on 5/2/16 | 4:02 AM CET

Nicholas Earth

Interesting.
Thank you for sharing.

Posted on 5/3/16 | 12:22 AM CET

MF

Sooo biased. I’m not a Trump fan, but what if they put this much energy and imagination into smearing Hillary and her billionaire/millionaire socialist donators. A party funded by the corrupt rich to keep the lower class poor, so they will keep voting for them and their handouts.